DS Fantasy Eurovision 22: Don't Look Back In Stavanger

We move onto our 22nd edition of this competition and this time we’ve landed in the land of the Fjords, The Kingdom of Norway!

It’s our first trip back to Norway since Fantasy Eurovision 4 and after a ferocious bidding war for the right to play host, we’ve ended up in Norway’s fourth largest city, Stavanger. Unfortunately Bergen lost out on hosting rights due to not providing as good a slogan. I think after the ending to the previous contest and the winning song, it’s quite fitting.

Onto the serious stuff.

There’s going to be a few changes for this contest as I’m returning us to our original format of two semi finals and a final. Also, and most of you won’t like this, depending on the numbers of sign ups nobody will be guaranteed two countries (Unless there’s no interest after this, I won’t be taking part). At the moment I’m working with 52 countries making up two semi finals of 26 songs.

For this contest the selection period for you to choose your songs is going to increase to try and create a National Final type season – without the National Finals! The reason for this being it gives you longer to look for the perfect song. Also, it should give people longer to get used to the contests songs before the voting begins. It’s your decision whether you take the risk of picking early and getting your song well heard before the contest begins or doing a BBC and leaving your song till the selection deadline. Plus I hope if the songs are released over a longer period it will encourage people to do some more reviews as there’s less songs to sit through at once.

The usual selection requirements stand

No songs featured in Eurovision, either the actual contest or a national selection process are eligible

The artist(s) you select must have a connection to the country you are allocated. This will be judged by the reasonable test!

Entries selected must be no longer than 5 minutes

No songs from earlier than 2000

And no songs which have reached the UK Top 30

Sign up is open from now until 6pm on Tuesday 27th March. If you’ve already signed up there’s no need to send another message. Any new players interesting in taking part who don't know the lowdown just PM me and I'll add you to the list.

I wanted 26 players and strangely, I got 26 sign ups! So everyone will be getting two countries. To decide the countries I split them into two pots of 26. These are subjective so I’m sure there’ll be some grumblings but I did it based on population size, music industry size and my experience of looking for songs from countries.

I’ve paired up the countries as fairly as possible so the weaker of the Pot One countries are paired with one of the stronger countries in Pot Two. Hopefully everyone will be happy with at least one country they get but it’s impossible to make everyone happy! Every player will be allocated to a pair of countries using http://www.random.org/lists/

Once you’ve got your countries you have until Saturday 7th April to trawl to the depths of YouTube to find the perfect song for your country. Hopefully we’ll get a nice flow of entries but it’s up to the player to decide whether to dive in and get your song out there early or wait till the last minute and see what the competition is. I’m hoping that over the next 10 days we’ll have a chance to get used to the songs before the voting starts and with less songs thrown at you at once more people will be encouraged to do some reviews.

When all the entries are in we’ll have a couple of days to speculate before we enter into Eurovision week where we’ll have two semi finals before a grand finale that weekend.
It’s experimental but I hope it will freshen the format up a bit because for me the qualifying round and the sheer volume of songs you had to sit through was getting too much. I hope you all give it a chance!